"Burn in hell, Adam Lanza."

Like the portrait in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, his is the face of insanity too, and the record of this young mass murderer’s brief and troubled existence also paints a frightening picture.

“Burn in Hell,” one of Adam Lanza’s former high school classmates said of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter who, along with dozens of others he slew on December 14, 2012, took his own life as well.

Perhaps, if in fact there is a place made of brimstone and fire, then that’s exactly where the 20-year-old psychopath now permanently resides, together with the likes of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, and others of their dangerous ilk.

But, long before Lanza took up residency in Hell, the youth already had one foot in the door, say those who personally knew this glowering menace to society.

“There’s someone shooting in the building…”

When police first responded on the morning of December 14th to reports of gunfire at the Sandy Hook school in the upscale suburb of Newtown, Connecticut, they found the front window of the facility had been shattered.

This is likely where and how the shooter forcibly entered the building, arriving minutes too late to simply walk unnoticed through the main doors—armed to the teeth as it were with firearms, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and malice aforethought.

In what has now become a normal security mode for many school systems in America since the Columbine High Massacre in 1999, Sandy Hook’s entrances and exits had all been locked and the school itself held off limits to visitors whilst classes there had finally commenced.

Not much more than a decade ago, safety measures like those would have been viewed as excessive and downright paranoid, yet, in this era of weekly mass shootings and runaway youth-on-youth violence, such extreme precautions are not only wise, they’ve become a necessity.

Still, even those safeguards were not enough to prevent an evil visitation.

Goth gamer goes berserk

He is being described in general as “deeply disturbed”, but, as will soon be revealed, this barely scratches the surface of soulless Adam Lanza, a “brilliant but remote” violent videogamer who was so dysfunctional he could only speak in short bursts and had a “condition” in which he experienced no pain, either emotionally or physically.

“Adam had a lot of mental problems,” a friend of the family volunteered. “Everyone had to be careful that he didn’t fall because he could get hurt and not feel it.“

And, as his people knew or should have known, the boy could kill too, and not feel a thing.

Everyone had to be careful

Unlike the mother of Columbine’s co-shooter Dylan Klebold, who, when she first learned that her teenage son was one of the assailants that grim day “prayed he would commit suicide,” Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy doesn’t have to bear any guilt in the aftermath of her own boy’s bloody rampage.

He killed her first.

It is not being very “careful” to refuse to acknowledge your demented child’s potential to harm you or other human beings. Nor is it very wise to look the other way at his dark activities and obsessions. In that parental abdication, it is additionally shortsighted to have stockpiled an arsenal of weaponry which he could, one awful day, decide to load and abscond with...

Police now say that the guns that Adam Lanza used to commit parricide and mass murder were purchased by and registered to his mother and father.

Records also show that the Lanzas were divorced recently, and Adam Lanza lived alone with Nancy Lanza in the lap of luxury at a home located less than ten miles from the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where the woman is said to have once taught kindergarteners.

Lanza too attended the Sandy Hook schools, and was reportedly listed many years in a row as an honor student.

But that is the extent of his attributes and accomplishments, and, indeed, most can’t say now if this so called child “genius” ever even got it together enough to graduate.

Brokenhearted

Yes, if only one or two small children, it would still have been a heartbreaking body count, let alone twenty.

The preventable slaughter of these defenseless and innocent little ones was accompanied by five of their teachers as well as the school principal, the woman who, while being fired upon, was thought to have activated the school’s Public Address loudspeaker just in time to warn everyone.

That terrible tally makes the Sandy Hook Massacre the largest public school shooting in the history of the United States, and second only to the Virginia Tech shooting by a mentally ill student named Seung-Hui Cho, in 2007.

But copycats abound these days, vying for the record books, so it won't be the last bloodbath we ever see.

”It has to stop, these senseless deaths," Columbine High School’s principal Frank DeAngelis sadly opined, when the news of yet another vicious attack on schoolchildren had rung out across the land.

“Our hearts are broken,” a teary-eyed President Obama, father of two school-age daughters himself, choked with grief, as he spoke to the nation about the unprecedented event. Doing so at precisely the hour many schoolchildren were headed home from their classes.

The time has come for a “meaningful discussion” about gun ownership, Obama also added, in an apparent about-face from a statement released by the White House earlier in the day which stated, in effect, “now is not the time to debate gun control legislation.”

Gun Control

Without a doubt, people should control their guns. However, the truth is that most U.S. citizens are not lawless whether they do or don’t have access to firearms.

In short, guns don’t kill, violent people do, and more and more these individuals are young males with a clear history of antisocial behavior and tendencies, and a fascination, bordering on fixation, with virtual killing.

The history of gun ownership in America dates all the way back to its pioneer days. Then, every man, woman and child had some experience with handling muskets, rifles, and handguns, as well as wielding a range of knives that could be concealed or were as large as machetes.

They used these for hunting and, whenever required, to defend their families and homesteads. Rarely, despite Hollywood’s inglorious depictions of the wild, wild West, were such weapons employed to wantonly murder with.

Today, the same is basically true. It’s simply that the array of offerings—like fully automatic assault rifles and armor piercing bullets—is making it too easy for the deranged minority to slay in mere minutes and in great numbers.

Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Klebold and Harris, Adam Lanza…gun control should be honestly discussed now, and without any further delay. But to attempt to address this issue without addressing the source of so many of these public shooters’ uncontrollable rage, would be pointless and ineffectual.

Because, like the Adam Lanzas of the world, these malicious mental cases are hell bent, and will find the means to execute carnage on the rest of us no matter what obstacles are placed in their way.

So it is time. Agreed. Time for the billion-dollar videogame industry to at last fess up to the deadly nature of their “games” and undertake to limit and even restrict content that instructs impressionable and unsuspecting young users in how to become expert marksmen.

This is not how we should be educating our children. Nor should otherwise harmless youngsters be taught to fear for their lives night and day.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998. Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: Read More